Subject
78 entries
Visualization
Bookmarks
visual-explainer: HTML pages instead of ASCII art from agents
visual-explainer is a Claude Code agent skill that generates styled HTML pages instead of ASCII art for diagrams, diff reviews, architecture overviews, and data tables. Fixes the terminal readability problem for complex agent output.
Understanding Neural Networks, Visually
An interactive web visualization that walks through how neural networks work — weights, activations, backpropagation — through direct manipulation. Good at building intuition rather than just showing diagrams.
HyperContext: spatial context visualization for AI sessions
HyperContext visualizes AI session state as a spatial map — see what the model actually knows, how the context window is structured, and where attention is distributed. Makes the invisible context window visible.
Seeing Theory: visual probability and statistics
Seeing Theory is an interactive visualization project from Brown University that teaches probability and statistics through simulation rather than equations. Six chapters covering basic probability through Bayesian inference, all with manipulable parameters and live experiment feedback.
Strange Attractors: dynamical systems visualization
A Three.js particle system visualization of Strange Attractors with a clear explainer on dynamical systems, chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and the geometry of attractors in phase space. Combines technical education with beautiful visual output.
ROSplat: Real-Time ROS2 Gaussian Splatting Visualizer
ROSplat is the first real-time ROS2-based visualizer using Gaussian splatting for 3D scene rendering — custom ROS2 messages carry Gaussian parameters, GPU-accelerated via CUDA and OpenGL. Useful for robotic 3D scene reconstruction and visualization in real time.
Topography Explorer: interactive terrain visualization
Topography Explorer is a web tool for visualizing topographic elevation data interactively — browse terrain, contours, and elevation gradients across the globe using open elevation datasets.
Bluerain
Bluerain visualizes the Bluesky firehose as Matrix-style falling text rain — each character stream is a live post flowing through the AT Protocol. A beautiful way to sense the scale and flow of social network activity.
MLGarden: Visual Neural Network Editor
MLGarden is an interactive visual editor for building and training neural networks without linear algebra — you construct computation graphs visually, watch backpropagation happen, and train on classification tasks. Built in C++ for performance, runs in the browser for accessibility.
Decentralized Tech Ecosystem Map
The Digital Life Collective's Kumu map of the decentralized tech ecosystem — a visual graph of projects, protocols, and organizations across blockchain, P2P, privacy, identity, and governance spaces. A useful orientation map for the broader decentralization movement.
Visualizing a Codebase (GitHub Next)
GitHub Next's repo visualization project creates circle-packing diagrams of codebases where circle size = file size, color = file type, and nesting = folder hierarchy. Generates a visual fingerprint of a repo, with a GitHub Action for auto-updating README diagrams.
mind — moebio.com
An interactive visualization project by Santiago Ortiz (moebio.com) exploring mind/brain concepts through generative and data-driven graphics. Ortiz creates some of the most thoughtful intersection of data visualization and conceptual art.
Inspectus: LLM Analytics and Visualization
Inspectus is labml.ai's tool for visualizing LLM internals — attention maps, token distributions, and model analytics rendered as interactive visualizations in Jupyter notebooks. Makes transformer attention patterns inspectable without custom code.
Open Infrastructure Map: visualizing physical infrastructure from OpenStreetMap
Open Infrastructure Map visualizes power lines, substations, gas pipelines, telecom towers, and other physical infrastructure from OpenStreetMap data. A public, interactive map of the hidden physical systems civilization depends on.
ChunkViz: Visualize Text Splitting for RAG Pipelines
ChunkViz is a visual tool for comparing different text splitting strategies — see exactly how your documents get chunked with different chunk sizes, overlap settings, and splitting methods. Essential for debugging RAG pipelines where chunking quality directly affects retrieval quality.
LLM Visualization: Interactive 3D Transformer Walkthrough
An interactive 3D visualization of how LLMs work — walking through the transformer architecture token by token, layer by layer, with actual weight animations. The clearest visual explanation of attention, embeddings, and feedforward layers available.
Timeline of Transformer Models and Large Language Models
A visual timeline of transformer models and large language models from 2017 through the present, mapping the lineage of architectures from the original Attention Is All You Need paper through GPT-4 and beyond. A useful reference for understanding model genealogy.
D2 — Diagram Scripting Language
D2 is a modern diagram scripting language that compiles text to diagrams — like Graphviz but with a cleaner syntax, built-in layouts, and themes. Treats diagrams as code, enabling version control and programmatic generation.
Bartosz Ciechanowski — Interactive Explainer Archives
Bartosz Ciechanowski's archives of interactive visual explainers — deep, painstaking explanations of physics and engineering concepts through interactive WebGL simulations. Some of the best technical writing and visualization on the internet.
Ideas for Better Programming Tools
Emil's exploration of ideas for better programming tools — focused on making programs more visible, legible, and interactive. Sits in the tradition of Bret Victor's work on seeing inside running programs.
Interactive and Visual Prompt Engineering for Ad-hoc Task Adaptation with Large Language Models
A research paper presenting interactive and visual tools for prompt engineering that let users iteratively adapt large language models to ad-hoc tasks without fine-tuning. It addresses the core usability gap in prompt engineering: the feedback loop between prompt edits and output quality is opaque without tooling that makes the connection visible.
Distill: Clear Explanations of Machine Learning
Distill.pub is a peer-reviewed ML journal focused on unusually clear explanations of machine learning concepts, using interactive visualizations alongside rigorous technical content. Went on hiatus in 2021 after 5 years, but the archive remains the gold standard for interactive ML pedagogy.
Random Forest — MLU-Explain
MLU-Explain's visual, interactive introduction to the Random Forest algorithm — animated trees, bootstrap sampling, and feature importance built into the browser. Part of Amazon's ML University series of interactive learning tools.
Jay Alammar — Visualizing Machine Learning
Jay Alammar's blog is the go-to resource for visually understanding modern ML architectures — transformers, BERT, GPT, and more through hand-crafted diagrams. His illustrated explainers have become canonical references for practitioners who want intuition before equations.
Colah's Blog — Chris Olah on Neural Networks
Chris Olah's personal blog is foundational reading for anyone trying to understand deep learning from first principles — his LSTM explainer, neural network topology post, and attention posts have shaped how a generation of researchers think about these models. Olah went on to co-found Anthropic's interpretability team, and the blog reflects his interest in mechanistic understanding.
BLOOM Training Corpus: 2D Embedding Visualization
A 2D UMAP visualization of 10 million text chunks from the BLOOM training corpus, encoded with all-distilroberta-v1. A rare window into the geometry of a frontier model's pretraining data.
Text Embeddings Visually Explained
Cohere's visual primer on text embeddings explains how words and sentences become vectors in high-dimensional space, and what operations on those vectors mean semantically. A good conceptual foundation before diving into practical embedding-based applications like semantic search or classification.
MLU-Explain: Visual ML Education
MLU-Explain is Amazon's collection of interactive visual explainers for core machine learning concepts — decision trees, random forests, bias-variance tradeoff, cross-validation, and more. Built as interactive articles in the style of Distill.pub, targeting practitioners who want intuition over math.
Map of Reddit
Andrei Kashcha's interactive force-directed graph visualizing Reddit's subreddit communities as a navigable map — clusters emerge from cross-posting and subscriber overlap patterns. A striking example of community structure made visible through graph layout.
Communicating with Interactive Articles
Distill's meta-article on how interactive articles work and why they communicate research better than static papers — covering active reading, explorable explanations, and the design principles behind effective interactive science communication. A piece that argues for its own medium.
Mechanical Watch — Bartosz Ciechanowski
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive explainer on mechanical watches — how gears, springs, and the escapement mechanism keep time. One of the best pieces of interactive educational content on the web: the mechanisms are rendered in 3D and respond to your interaction.
Anatomy of an AI System
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's 2018 visual essay dissecting an Amazon Echo as a case study in the full global supply chain, labor, and infrastructure behind AI systems — materials, data labor, algorithmic labor, user labor. One of the most cited critical AI artifacts.
GAN Lab: Interactive GANs in the Browser
GAN Lab is an interactive browser-based tool for playing with Generative Adversarial Networks — visualizing the generator and discriminator training dynamics in real time. One of the best tools for building intuition about how GANs work and fail.
How UMAP Works
The official UMAP documentation explaining the mathematical intuition behind the algorithm — Riemannian geometry and fuzzy simplicial sets as the conceptual foundation. More rigorous than most t-SNE/UMAP comparisons and explains why UMAP preserves global structure better.
The Illustrated Transformer
Jay Alammar's illustrated walkthrough of the Transformer architecture — the most widely cited visual explainer of attention, encoder-decoder structure, and multi-head attention. A must-read before diving into any BERT, GPT, or T5 paper.
DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer's Hidden Layers
The story behind Google's DeepDream — how researcher Alexander Mordvintsev discovered that running gradient ascent on a convolutional network's hidden layers produces psychedelic imagery that reveals what features the network learned. A landmark moment in neural network interpretability.
How to Use t-SNE Effectively
Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viégas, and Ian Johnson's interactive Distill article on how t-SNE maps actually work — and how to avoid misreading them. Essential reading before trusting any t-SNE plot.
Gradient Boosting Explained
Alex Rogozhnikov's interactive 3D visualization of gradient boosting — shows how decision boundaries evolve as the ensemble builds up trees. One of the cleaner intuition-builders for gradient boosting before XGBoost dominance made it feel like a black box.
The ROC Curve Explained
A visual explanation of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and AUC for binary classifier evaluation. One of the clearest introductions to the concept for practitioners learning to assess model performance beyond accuracy.
Markov Chains Explained Visually
Setosa.io's interactive visual explainer for Markov chains — manipulable transition matrices, live state diagrams, and steady-state convergence demonstrated in browser. The best introductory treatment of the concept available on the web.
Voynich Manuscript: Word Vectors and t-SNE Visualization
Christian Perone applies word2vec embeddings and t-SNE visualization to the Voynich Manuscript — an undeciphered 15th-century text — to surface structural patterns in its unknown script. A creative application of NLP tools to a centuries-old mystery.
A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning
A scrollytelling visual explanation of decision trees by Stephanie Yee and Tony Chu — widely considered one of the best examples of data visualization as pedagogy. It makes the algorithm's splitting logic tangible without any math.
Inconvergent: Generative Art by Anders Hoff
Anders Hoff's (inconvergent) generative art site — algorithmic drawings that simulate natural processes like erosion, growth, and diffusion. His work is notable for making mathematical processes legible as aesthetic objects.
Visualizing Representations: Deep Learning and Human Beings
Christopher Olah's essay on visualizing what neural networks actually learn — using dimensionality reduction to show how deep networks transform data into progressively more separable representations. One of the most important early pieces on deep learning interpretability.
Markov Chains Explained Visually
Victor Powell's interactive visual explanation of Markov chains using animated state diagrams — one of the best-known examples of explorable explanations in mathematics. Essential reading for anyone building intuition for probabilistic state systems before tackling HMMs, PageRank, or reinforcement learning.
MapGraph — GPU-Accelerated Graph Analytics
MapGraph is a high-performance graph analytics framework using GPU acceleration for large-scale graph algorithms. An early example of GPU-accelerated graph processing before NVIDIA's RAPIDS ecosystem made this mainstream.
Introduction to A*
Amit Patel's interactive introduction to pathfinding algorithms, building from breadth-first search through Dijkstra's to A* — the standard reference for understanding the A* algorithm's design rationale. The interactive diagrams make the tradeoffs between algorithms immediately tangible.
Sightwind
Sightwind is a wind visualization project — saved with the note 'this is gorgeous,' likely an animated map of wind patterns. In the style of Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg's wind map that inspired many similar projects.
Univariate Distribution Relationship Chart
Lawrence Leemis's interactive chart showing the relationships between 76 univariate probability distributions — which distributions are special cases of others, how they connect via limits and parameter settings. An essential reference chart for anyone working seriously with probability distributions.
ConvNetJS Demo: Classify Toy 2D Data
Andrej Karpathy's ConvNetJS demo for classifying 2D toy datasets — a real-time browser visualization of a neural network training on user-drawn boundaries. One of the first compelling interactive deep learning visualizations.
Visualizing K-Means Clustering
Naftali Harris's interactive visualization of k-means clustering — place points on a canvas and watch the algorithm converge step by step. Exposes why initialization matters and where k-means fails.
ConvNetJS: Deep Learning in Your Browser
Andrej Karpathy's JavaScript library for training neural networks entirely in the browser — no install, no GPU, instant demos. In 2014 it made deep learning tangible for anyone with a web browser.
K-Means Clustering 86 Single Malt Scotch Whiskies
Clustering 86 single malt Scotch whiskies by flavor profile using k-means in R — a fun worked example that makes clustering tangible. Shows how to choose k and interpret results when the data has real-world meaning.
Gorgeous, Colorful Look at the Cellphone Signals We Never See
The Verge feature on Nickolay Lamm's colorful visualizations of invisible cell phone signal fields — rendering the electromagnetic environment around cell towers as psychedelic color fields. Makes invisible infrastructure visible.
Data Analysis Architecture Workflow Diagram
VentureBeat/DataBeat data analysis architecture diagram circulated on Twitter in 2013 — a workflow schematic showing the layers of a big data pipeline from collection through analysis to visualization. Snapshot of how practitioners were thinking about data infrastructure.
Topological Data Analysis from Ayasdi
Tweet from DataBeat 2013 noting Ayasdi's topological data analysis platform for sequential/genomic data. TDA was an emerging approach to finding structure in high-dimensional data without requiring dimensionality reduction assumptions.
Happy Healthy Hungry: San Francisco Data-Driven Narrative
Jay Oh-en's 'Happy Healthy Hungry' IPython notebook — a data-driven narrative about San Francisco restaurant health inspections shared at the Zipfian Academy graduation. One of the early examples of a published, storytelling-oriented data science notebook.
WIRED: Visualizing Gravity (Rocks in Paint)
WIRED tweet sharing Fabian Oefner's rocks-in-paint photography — saved alongside the article itself. See also the direct article note.
Rocks Dropped Into Paint Look Like Trippy, Amazing Flowers
WIRED Design piece on high-speed photography of rocks dropped into paint — the impact creates flower-shaped splash forms captured at microsecond timescales. A visual demonstration of gravity and fluid dynamics in action.
prettyplotlib: Painlessly Create Beautiful Matplotlib Plots
Olga Botvinnik's prettyplotlib — a Python library that wraps matplotlib with better defaults (ColorBrewer palettes, no chartjunk) to produce publication-quality plots without manual style configuration. The answer to 'why does matplotlib look so bad by default?'
A Wonderfully Simplified Map of San Francisco's Bicycle Infrastructure
Atlantic Cities piece on a simplified, design-forward map of San Francisco's bicycle infrastructure by John Metcalfe. The map prioritizes wayfinding clarity over geographic accuracy — in the tradition of the London Tube map.
Traffic Waves Simulation
Lewis Lehe's interactive browser simulation of traffic waves — slow one car down and watch a ripple of phantom congestion propagate backward through traffic. Makes emergent complex-systems behavior viscerally tangible.
SeqAlign: Sequence Alignment Visualization
SeqAlign is a browser-based DNA/protein sequence alignment visualization tool by Chris Fenton. A clean interface for a foundational bioinformatics algorithm — useful for understanding how pairwise alignment works visually.
Directed Graph Editor in D3
A D3.js bl.ocks example implementing an interactive directed graph editor with drag-to-create nodes and edges, arrow rendering, and selectable/deletable elements. A canonical reference for anyone building graph editing UIs in D3 before dedicated libraries like Cytoscape.js were widely adopted.
Sorting Algorithms Are Mesmerizing When Visualized
Gizmodo's coverage of a visualization showing 15 different sorting algorithms in motion — the classic side-by-side comparison of bubble sort, quicksort, merge sort, and others that makes their behavioral differences viscerally apparent. A perennial teaching tool.
London Calling: Winning the Data Olympics
Mozilla OpenNews writeup on data journalism techniques used during the 2012 London Olympics, covering how journalists used open data and visualization to create compelling stories. An early example of the data journalism craft crystallizing around concrete, time-pressured work.
Map Stack by Stamen
Stamen Design's Map Stack tool, which let anyone create beautiful custom map styles by layering and compositing tile layers from different map providers. A 2013 milestone in making professional cartographic design accessible to non-cartographers.
Crunching NYC Subway Data: A New Yorker's Busiest Stations
A data analysis post combining Node.js and SQL to parse MTA turnstile data and identify New York City's busiest subway stations. An early example of civic data journalism: public transit data as a lens on urban density and movement.
The Central Limit Theorem — Visual Explanation
Victor Powell's interactive visualization of the Central Limit Theorem, showing how sample means converge to a normal distribution regardless of the underlying population distribution. A beautiful interactive demonstration that makes the theorem's implications visceral rather than abstract.
BioBlender — Biological Visualization in Blender
BioBlender is a Blender plugin for scientific visualization of molecular biology data — rendering protein structures, DNA, and cellular components using the same 3D animation tools used for film VFX. Makes professional-quality biological visualization accessible to researchers.
Stamen ♥ Here — Nokia Here 3D Map Tiles
Stamen Design's rendering of Nokia Here 3D map tiles — a collaboration that turned Nokia's lidar-based urban data into stunning isometric city visualizations. A showcase of what happens when cartographic data meets sophisticated design.
GenomeBrowse: Free Tool for Visualizing DNA-seq and RNA-seq BAM Files
GenomeBrowse from Golden Helix — a free desktop genome browser for visualizing DNA-seq and RNA-seq BAM files. A 2013 alternative to IGV for exploring aligned sequencing data.
OldSF: Historical San Francisco Photo Map
OldSF maps historical San Francisco photographs from 1850-2000 by location, letting you explore how any street corner looked across 150 years of the city's history. Saved with the hope of a Street View mashup.
slitscanner.js by Sha Hwang
Sha Hwang's slitscanner bookmarklet applies slit-scan photography to YouTube and Vimeo videos in the browser — collapsing a spatial slice through time to produce streak-style images. A clever application of a classic experimental film technique to browser video.
How to Fold a Julia Fractal
Steven Wittens' (acko.net) interactive explainer on Julia sets and complex number iteration — using animated WebGL visualizations to show how complex plane geometry folds into the fractal boundary. One of the best mathematical explanations written for the web.
CanvasXpress: Scientific Data Visualization
CanvasXpress — a JavaScript library for scientific and genomics data visualization, specifically designed for bioinformatics use cases like expression heatmaps, scatter plots with gene annotations, and interactive exploration of multi-dimensional biological data.
Shadow and Substance: Eclipse Visualization Tool
Shadow and Substance was a web tool that showed an animated view of solar eclipses in your area, including the May 2012 annular eclipse. A clean educational visualization for understanding eclipse geometry — where the umbra and penumbra fall across the Earth's surface.
All of Earth's Water as a Single Sphere
The USGS created a visualization showing all of Earth's water as a single sphere — it's surprisingly small, only about 860 miles in diameter relative to Earth's 7,900-mile diameter. A powerful intuition-corrector for how scarce liquid freshwater actually is.